Experience with the KeyNote trust management system: Applications and future directions

Abstract

Access control in distributed systems has been an area of intense research in recent years. One promising approach has been that of trust management, whereby authentication and authorization decisions are combined in a unified framework for evaluating security policies and credentials. In this paper, we report on our experience of the past seven years using the PolicyMaker and the KeyNote trust management systems in a variety of projects. We start with a brief overview of trust management in general, and KeyNote in particular; we describe several applications of trust management; we then discuss various features we found missing from our initial version of KeyNote, which would have been useful in the various applications it was used. We conclude the paper with our plans for future research. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.